Overcoming Grief

(I started to write this piece many months back. For some reasons, I just couldn't complete it. Sometimes it takes time to understand your own feelings. I still couldn't say that I fully understand this phenomenon of grief. After all, our learning is a continuing process and is influenced by multiple events)

Experts say that when you lose a loved one, you grieve through stages. These are:

1. Shock and numbness, wherein events seem to lose their importance after the death of a loved one. This stage is nature's way of enabling you to do things necessary to carry on.

2. Emotional turmoil, where extremes of emotion are commonly felt throughout the bereavement. The emotional support, sympathetic ears and reassuring words of friends and loved ones may be most needed.

3. Emptiness, where you face the loneliness that follows death. The care of other people are a major help in your need and where ties with family and friends are important.

4. Acceptance. In due time, renewed zest for life will follow bereavement and grief. Life will regain its spark, and you will be on an even keel again.

When Yam peacefully died in her sleep months ago, the family was unusually calm. Clasped into each other's hands, we surrounded her as the medical staff documented the event. Being around an ill person who has become unresponsive to medication prepares you for the inevitable. And watching her deteriorate daily led us to expect this natural conclusion.

But, unusually calm? Perhaps it was more apt to say we were numbed. Knowing that this event is going to happen provided us the cushion to avert the shock. The usual events that follow death like the wake and the funeral were emotionally profound. I believe they are necessary for the whole family to experience as they signify the completion of the cycle of birth to death. The funeral is a public act of finality to a loved one's physical presence.

To signify closure to this event, each member of our family not only threw into the grave a select flower or two, but spaded soil into the grave to bury and lay to rest the loved one who died.

I believe we need not overcome grief in the sense that we conquer it. The void in one's life caused by the departure of a loved can never be filled by anyone. This is why overcoming grief, to me, is best achieved by living with it, finding its meaning and not allowing it to rule or ruin your life. Grief due to the loss of a loved one is part of life. Recognizing it at such makes you whole.